The new, high-tech sports cheat

By Huntington F. Willard - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Op-ed - News: "NOW THAT the Tour de France is in full swing, one wonders if the annual innuendo about whether or not Lance Armstrong is clean will finally end after he cruises down the Champs Elysees for the last time -- wearing yellow, he hopes -- and rides off into the sunset with pop chanteuse Sheryl Crow on his arm.

Maybe for Lance it will -- he is, as he likes to say, the most drug-tested athlete in history, and his tests have always come back clean. The same, however, cannot be said of some of his peers. Just last month at a Tour de France tuneup event, two riders were suspended for excessive levels of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, a strong indicator of blood doping.

For all of the recent headlines about blood doping and anabolic steroid usage in sports, high-tech gene-doping may soon have the dubious honor of rendering them obsolete. National Football League Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said as much earlier this year when he appeared before Congress during steroid hearings: ''When [gene-doping] happens, the issues that our society is discussing today . . . will be as irrelevant as the blacksmith in the automobile age."

Gene-doping, the nontherapeutic use of DNA and/or cells to enhance athletic performance, has the potential to offer the cheater a souped-up body that can run faster and jump higher and whose modifications are virtually undetectable. If an athlete injects himself with additional copies of a gene already present in the body, how is one to distinguish the original from the copy? Only an expensive and invasive muscle biopsy could detect a slightly altered synthetic gene.

We know that a high proportion of our physical prowess is hard-wired in our genomes. A recent study of young adult males undergoing cycle training suggested that as many as 500 genes and DNA markers scattered across the genome may be associated with athletic performance and health-related fitness. Mice lacking the myostatin gene, for example, tend to develop huge muscles, the result of more and bigger muscle fibers. These rodents have been nicknamed ''Schwarzenegger mice." How many bodybuilders could resist that?

As with other doping methods, the safety issues surrounding gene-doping should be enough to give athletes pause. Abuse of a drug called EPO, a synthetic version of a natural hormone that increases the number of red blood cells, can have devastating consequences. EPO can thicken the blood to such an extent that it will cause heart failure, especially in elite athletes whose resting heart rates tend to be extraordinarily slow. Not long after the arrival of EPO in cycling, 18 Belgian and Dutch cyclists died suddenly of heart attacks. So it is fair to ask: What will the risks of EPO gene-doping be once the EPO gene can be administered without fear of detection?

Some have argued that the best way to control gene-doping is to legalize it. After all, if Tiger Woods can have Lasik eye surgery to improve his vision to 20/10 and thereby help his golf game, why shouldn't a cyclist be able to modify his genes? Moreover, this argument goes, by making gene-doping legal and regulating it, safety standards could be imposed.

However, would gene-doping violate the spirit of sports? So far, the official response is yes. In recent years, both the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency have added gene-doping to their lists of banned substances. Whether a practical means of enforcing those bans can be developed remains to be seen.

In our competitive culture, the desire to win is ever present. Earlier this year, after Major League Baseball was shamed into imposing a stricter steroid-testing regimen, the commissioner of baseball's office released the names of 41 minor leaguers who had failed spring training drug tests.

Remarkably, these players stayed on the juice even though they knew they were likely going to be tested, caught, and publicly identified.

Blood doping may be going the way of the blacksmith, but there appears to be little doubt that gene-doping will soon be here to stay. What will that mean for the games we play?

Huntington F. Willard is director of Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy."